Doris Tijerino: Revolution, Writing, and Resistance in Nicaragua

This essay examines the autobiographical texts of Doris Tijerino, a Sandinista revolutionary from Nicaragua. Composed in 1974–1975, "Somos millones . . .": La vida de Doris María, combatiente nicaragüense (1977) was published in English in 1978 as Inside the Nicaraguan Revolution. Just one year later, the Sandinista triumph would demand that Tijerino's story be updated—as it was in her autobiographical narratives published in Denis Lynn Daly Heyck's collection Life Stories of the Nicaraguan Revolution (1990) and Margaret Randall's Sandino's Daughters Revisited (1994). My reading of her work draws to the fore questions of gender, violence, human rights, and revolutionary struggle in twentieth-century Latin America, the echoes of which might be heard in contemporary discussion of these same questions in a global context. My analysis of Tijerino's lifewriting reveals the impact of gender politics on representations of the national struggle in Nicaragua, most significantly in Tijerino's use of the trope of motherhood to characterize revolution and her emphasis on gendering the female revolutionary in prison.